Every year I think, “This is the year, I’m going to get really organized and do all the right things because this is my year!!!!” I’ll leave it to your imagination how well that works.
One year I happened to find a teacher planner in the dollar section at Target that worked really well when I only had to fit two kids into those little boxes. I could’t find it again and even if I could have, it would be hard to fit three different kids into it. Last year I did bullet journaling which worked surprisingly well for my disorganized self. My only problem was long term planning with that. Day to day was great but then I’d forget that a BIG HUGE EVENT was coming and not be prepared.
This year I got a trail membership of Homeschool Planet and at first I really liked it. I could plan our regular routine out so that I didn’t spend the first twenty minutes of each day figuring out what we were going to do that day. Each day, assignments would just pop up, cool right. However, I started to feel really pressured to complete our list each day and then we have all these activities that take up huge chunks of our day and we end up working on school work after dinner. I HATE that.
None of this is Homeschool Planet’s fault, I did really like it but I think maybe, for my own mental health (always a fragile thing) I should not have a planner like it. It made it way too easy to make my expectations too big for our family to handle and we started missing the flexibility and spontaneity of homeschooling. Maybe I’ll revisit this all when we get to highschool but as long as I can, I want to keep those things a part of our homeschool.
So, I’m going back to the Bullet Journal and I resolve to use my google calendar for long range things and here’s hoping I will forget fewer things.
My point in all my ramblings here is not to recommend a type of planning or any particular system but only to encourage you all to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself sane because, no matter what kind of education you give your children, the biggest impact on your children will be from you. Don’t get me wrong, education is important, I wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t. But its nothing compared to family. Do what you need to do to be happy in your home schooling, find ways to make it joyful for yourself as well as your kids. If you are making yourself miserable by running around to 15 thousand activities and still expecting your tiny ones to diagram sentenses with precision, you’re probably making your kids miserable too and that is not how you want them to remember their childhood or their education.
So find ways to make the whole family happy. Ditch the planner or the activity or the curriculum that makes you both miserable. Find another option. Your life and their childhood is too short to do otherwise.
Messy Homeschool 